Shaping the future

In July 1988, Kenneth Clarke was appointed Secretary of State for Health. During the next two years he laid the foundations for the biggest reforms in the NHS since its creation in 1948. For Dr Mark Simpson, a general practitioner in Somerset, Clarke's reforms turned out to be the ignition for a career change. "I really have Kenneth Clarke to thank for my current role. When he first started to build the health service reforms in the early 1990s, I began to think that the future of general practice was not what I wanted to be involved in, so in 1993, I changed careers and retrained in occu...